To Dev or not to Dev

I have never been a big fan of Crystal Reports. I admit it is an extremely powerful tool and once you understand how to use and implement the solution it works well. However the costs in running it has never been a create drawing card for me.

There has been a lot of hype around the Microsoft SQL Reporting Services and one of the neat features of the RDL reporting system is the ability to do client side reporting without the need of Reporting Services. By creating RDLC reports the Microsoft Report Viewer can be used to run reports locally and provides powerful functionality including Graphs, Paging and PDF/Excel exports.

There seems to be a gap in finding information for it, until I came across a brilliant resource here.

I highly recommended looking into a RDLC solution for those that need to implement reports and don't want the overhead of using Crystal Reports. Visual Studio offers a full RDLC designer and there is also plug-ins available to implement it in Visual Studio Express Edition available at the above link.

There is also a third party project to support RDL in Framework 1.1 available here.